I Am Not a Tractor!: How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won

By Susan L. Marquis

I Am Not a Tractor! celebrates the courage, vision, and creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders who have transformed one of the worst agricultural situations in the United States into one of the best. Susan L. Marquis highlights past abuses workers suffered in Florida’s tomato fields: toxic pesticide exposure, beatings, sexual assault, rampant wage theft, and even, astonishingly, modern-day slavery. Marquis unveils how, even without new legislation, regulation, or government participation, these farmworkers have dramatically improved their work conditions.

Marquis credits this success to the immigrants from Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala who formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a neuroscience major who takes great pride in the watermelon crew he runs, a leading farmer/grower who was once homeless, and a retired New York State judge who volunteered to stuff envelopes and ended up building a groundbreaking institution. Through the Fair Food Program that they have developed, fought for, and implemented, these people have changed the lives of more than thirty thousand field workers. I Am Not a Tractor! offers a range of solutions to a problem that is rooted in our nation’s slave history and that is worsened by ongoing conflict over immigration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ILR Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501714306

Susan L. Marquis

Susan L. Marquis is Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and Vice President of Innovation at the RAND Corporation. She is the author of Unconventional Warfare.

Book preview

I AM NOT A TRACTOR!

How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won

Susan L. Marquis

ILR PRESS

AN IMPRINT OF

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS     ITHACA AND LONDON

To Chris

Contents

List of Characters

Acronyms and Organizations

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Getting to Immokalee

1. To Beat One of Us Is to Beat Us All!

2. Bang Your Head against the Wall Long Enough . . .

3. Campaigning for Fair Food

4. Has Anyone Talked with These Guys?

5. Eyes Wide Open

6. Forging the Path by Walking It

7. Value Can Have a Different Meaning

8. What Difference?

9. Designed for the Future

A Note on Sources

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Characters

Greg Asbed Cofounder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. A member of the CIW watermelon harvesting co-op crew that included Gerardo Reyes, Cruz Salucio, and Sean Sellers. Lead for the expansion of CIW’s Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) concept and program. Married to Laura Germino.

Lucas Benitez Cofounder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Born and raised in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. Widely recognized voice of the CIW and an active leader in the Campaign for Fair Food and of CIW’s Worker Education Program and outreach efforts. Active early in CIW’s antislavery efforts.

Jon Esformes Co-CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers, one of the largest tomato growers in Florida, with operations in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, California, and Mexico.

Laura Safer Espinoza Moved to Florida in 2010 after retiring as a justice on the New York State Supreme Court. Founding executive director of the Fair Food Standards Council.

Laura Germino Cofounder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Director of the CIW’s antislavery efforts and a recognized international leader in issues of forced labor. Married to Greg Asbed.

Steve Hitov Long-time social justice and human rights attorney. Began working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the early 1990s. Instrumental in negotiating Fair Food agreements with retail giants including Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Walmart.

Gerardo Reyes Joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the late 1990s soon after arriving in Florida from Zacatecas, Mexico. Active leader in the Campaign for Fair Food and a frequent CIW voice on television and other media. In addition to working in citrus and tomatoes, a member of the watermelon crew.

Leonel Perez Met Cruz, Gerardo, Sean, and Greg in 2006 when they were working in Georgia on the CIW watermelon crew. Moved to Immokalee in 2007. Leonel is on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers staff and has been a radio host on Radio Conciencia 107.9, known as La Tuya, given presentations during major actions as part of the CIW Campaign for Fair Food, and is an active leader on the CIW’s worker education teams.

Silvia Perez Arrived in Immokalee in 1993 and was one of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ earliest members, discovering the workers’ group in 1994. One of the first members of CIW’s Grupo de Mujeres and joined the staff in 2007. A leader in the CIW’s worker education team, long-time radio host on La Tuya, and an active voice in the Campaign for Fair Food.

Nely Rodriguez Worked in Michigan’s farm fields and then moved to Immokalee in 2000. Has been significantly involved in CIW’s antislavery work and in the groundbreaking anti-sexual-harassment program.

Cruz Salucio Arrived in Immokalee from Huehuetenango, Guatemala, and learned of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers through La Tuya. An active leader in the Campaign for Fair Food, a long-time radio host on La Tuya, and a primary leader of the CIW’s worker education teams.

Sean Sellers Initially interned at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers through the Student/Farmworker Alliance. Eventually led the SFA and later became a founding staff member of the Fair Food Standards Council. Long-time member of the watermelon harvesting crew.

David Wang Immigrated to the United States when he was fourteen, just after World War II. Graduated in engineering from Georgia Tech. In his career he has been a senior vice president at Union Carbide, a director at International Paper, and an operating partner at Atlas Holdings. Began supporting the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the late 1990s.

Acronyms and Organizations

Southwest Florida Farmworker Project: Precursor to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Founded in 1993 by farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida. The migrant workers worked in citrus and, most significantly, in tomatoes. Greg Asbed, Lucas Benitez, and Laura Germino are the three remaining cofounders active in the CIW.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW): The Southwest Florida Farmworkers Project formally incorporated as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in 1995. Usually referred to as CIW but also as the Coalition.

Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA): Ally of the Coalition, established in the late 1990s by university students in Florida and now a national organization.

Campaign for Fair Food: The campaign launched by the CIW in 2001 beginning with a boycott against Taco Bell. The campaign called for fair wages and safe working conditions for farmworkers and for workers to have a place at the table when the Florida tomato industry made decisions that affected their work, pay, and safety.

Fair Food Program: The CIW established this program in 2010 when the Campaign for Fair Food achieved agreements with major retail buyers and producers (referred to as growers). The Fair Food Program includes the code of conduct, the penny-per-pound Fair Food premium, the Fair Food Standards Council and its audits and 24/7 complaint line, and CIW’s Worker Education Program.

Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC): The oversight and monitoring nongovernmental agency for the Fair Food Program. Established in 2011.

Acknowledgments

Writers may write the books, but this writer at least could not have done so without support and encouragement from many, many people. As is always the case, their assistance was critical, and any errors are my own. I must begin my appreciation with David Wang, who introduced me to the members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. David is a generous philanthropist, and his support of the Pardee RAND Graduate School made it possible for me to visit Immokalee. His thoughtful insight was of great value, and David remained a touchstone throughout my research and writing.

This book is about not just the history of the CIW and the mechanics of the Fair Food Program but about the people of the CIW and the Fair Food Standards Council. They have shared their ideas and their lives with me for the past six years. I’d particularly like to thank those who were patient through many interviews and discussions, worked with me to schedule about a half-dozen visits to Immokalee, made it possible for me to observe and interview CIW worker education teams and FFSC audit teams, and took the time to walk me through the intricacies and nuances of Fair Food agreements, the code of conduct, and the Fair Food premium. In addition to those who participated in formal interviews and are acknowledged in the Note on Sources, I’d like to thank Marley Moynahan, Natalie Rodriguez, Daniel Cooper Bermudez, and Brian Kudinger from the CIW and the Student/Farmworker Alliance. Logistics, scheduling, translating, and photos: I could not have dived as deeply without your help.

I would not have written this book were it not for the work of Barry Estabrook and Eric Schlosser. Barry wrote the Gourmet article and then the masterful book Tomatoland, which brought the harsh reality of Florida’s tomato fields to my attention (and many others’) back in 2009. Eric Schlosser’s revolutionary Fast Food Nation hit hard in 2001, taking a no-holds-barred look at the rise and perils of fast food in the United States. That book continues to be a benchmark for those who care about food policy and the sources of our food. Schlosser caused readers to think about the food we eat and the effects of our consumption, not only on our health but also on agriculture, the environment, but particularly the people who grow, harvest, process, and serve what we eat. Schlosser extended this story in Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in America, taking on the issue of worker exploitation and the determined turning away by people to avoid looking at these undersides of the American economy. On a personal level, Eric was strongly supportive of my writing about the CIW. It is true that in February 2015, Eric asked, So, does RAND know you’ve become a communist? While in jest, Eric was not the first to respond with some surprise when he discovered the topic of my book, given my substantial career in guns and bombs. We first met when I hosted a discussion of nuclear security with Eric and RAND researcher Lynn Davis, in conjunction with Eric’s recent book Command and Control. But Eric was intrigued that I was seriously researching the Coalition and tomato workers in Florida. He understood from the beginning that I was approaching the Coalition’s work from a very different perspective from those in the field of agricultural labor and labor rights. I had long been a fan of Eric’s work and an admirer of his breadth of knowledge and interest. His support gave strength to my belief that I was on the right path.

Essential to my being able to write this book has been my professional home, the RAND Corporation and the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Now more than ever, the world needs RAND’s commitment to objective, nonpartisan policy analysis and the talent of graduates of Pardee RAND. Michael Rich, president of the RAND Corporation, made it possible for me to gain some distance and time to pull my thoughts and research together while in residence for two months at the RAND Europe office in Cambridge, England. Anita Szafran provided early guidance and troubleshooting on citations. Jane Ryan helped me find my way through book publishing while at RAND. Christopher Dirks has been invaluable in making my manuscript ready for publication. Pardee RAND Graduate School students Sara Kups and Ben Colaiaco helped me in 2013 with background research on American agricultural labor and corporate social responsibility programs. And Rachel Swanger and Jennifer Prim have been patient and encouraging when I’ve wandered into their offices needing to share my latest thought about why the Fair Food Program has worked.

Fran Benson and the Cornell University Press have provided a literary home for I Am Not a Tractor! It was exactly a year ago from the time I am writing these words that Fran responded quickly and enthusiastically when I sent her an e-mail asking if she would be interested in publishing my book on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Since that time, some of my most enjoyable discussions about this book, long-standing issues in labor rights, and the state of the world have been in conversation with Fran. She has shepherded this project through with kindness and commitment. I found my way to Fran through the advice of Bob Lockhart of the University of Pennsylvania Press. Bob and my RAND colleague and author Shelly Culbertson read my proposal and provided guidance and spirit lifting as I discovered the world of agents and publishers. Jim Brudney and Lance Compa offered highly helpful external reviews and comments.

John DiIulio has once again been generous in his intellectual and personal support of my endeavors. John was my dissertation advisor back in the day. We have become both friends and colleagues over the many years since then, and it is to John that I first turned when deciding to write I Am Not a Tractor! John read early, laborious outlines and papers as I wrestled with the purpose of the book and the value I might bring to the topic. He was the first outside reader of my proposal, sample chapter, and the full draft manuscript. John also funded three University of Pennsylvania Fox Leadership Fellows, Nicolas Garcia, Aaron Wolf, and Harrison Pharamond, to track down background information on international labor reports and social responsibility auditing firms. John is a wise man and a dear friend.

Most important, I thank my husband Chris Thompson. Chris is not necessarily known as a patient man but his patience was without measure as I devoted every weekend to writing. We developed a new approach to vacations where I wrote during the day and Chris explored lovely places on his own. More importantly, Chris was my first reader and my first editor. He was more than willing to let me know when something I had written was like reading a PowerPoint presentation, but he was also sincere when he thought I had hit just the right note. Chris has spent much of the past several years discussing my ideas, listening to tales from the tomato fields, and giving me the time and space to write. Thank you.

Prologue

GETTING TO IMMOKALEE

Late spring 2009 and I’ve been carrying the March issue of Gourmet in my bag for a couple of months. Mind, Body, and Seoul. Korean food is America’s next new cuisine. Easy Does It. Sometimes all it takes is a simple roast chicken . . . One of the values of yet another flight across the country is the chance to catch up. A World Away. Stretching west from Castile toward the Portuguese border . . . Truth be told, I’m a good cook. I’d broadened my food magazine selection to include more sophisticated journals such as The Art of Eating, but Gourmet had been there the longest, an old friend for stolen moments on the road or after a busy day . . . letting the image of communal tables filled with soul-satisfying food and new-found friends fill my head.

Somewhere over Oklahoma and flipping to page 40. The Price of Tomatoes. If you have eaten a tomato this winter, it might well have been picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery. I knew Barry Estabrook had long been a contributing editor at Gourmet with his Politics of the Plate features, but this article was different. Estabrook opens with what I have since learned is a signature of writing about Immokalee, Florida, and the migrant workers there. He describes the jarring transition when driving from Naples to Immokalee. In thirty-five miles or so you travel from multimillion-dollar homes, Saks Fifth Avenue, and luxury golf course after luxury golf course through the Corkscrew swamp at the north end of the Everglades, past tomato fields and orange groves partially hidden behind scrub oak, palmetto, and sand berms, into the trailers, low-rise apartments, small single-family homes with more than a few cars up on blocks, and the bars and bodegas that make up most of Immokalee. The scruffiness and poverty are worse than most, but the cars up on blocks, drainage ditches, and burned-out grass look a lot like much of rural southwest Florida. But it was not the scenery that caught my attention in Estabrook’s article. It was the story of unrelenting abuse of farmworkers, of modern-day slavery, complete with beatings, wage theft, and workers locked in the back of a box truck that served as their home. These workers were not in Thailand or Mexico or Kenya. They worked on tomato farms in Florida. And the setting was not the pre–Civil War or Jim Crow South; it was 2009.

Tucking the copy of Gourmet into my bag, I was thinking through what I had read, but I needed to turn to other matters. As it turned out, I was headed to Naples to touch base with one of the board members of the graduate school where I’d recently been appointed dean. After fifteen years with the Department of Defense leading warfare and operational analysis organizations and a half dozen years running a defense, healthcare, and analysis group in a Washington, DC, nonprofit, I had been ready to try something new. The stars aligned, and in late 2008 I had joined the RAND Corporation, not as a national security expert but as the dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the oldest and largest public policy PhD program in the United States. David Wang was on the school’s Board of Governors, and he was ready to step down with the arrival of a new dean.

I soon found myself in an elevator headed to David Wang’s penthouse apartment. Once inside, looking across the vast expanse of his living room, with its sharp-edged formal furniture, I had a hard time making out his features. He sat in shadows that contrasted with the glare of Naples sunshine flooding through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that looked out onto the Gulf of Mexico. David Wang had immigrated to the United States at the close of World War II, joining his father, a pioneer in nuclear physics in China, who had served as an envoy to President Roosevelt at the behest of the Chiang Kai-shek government. An engineer by training, with a long and successful career at Union Carbide and International Paper, David is a formal, somewhat impatient man. He gave little indication that he looked forward to our meeting. Struggling to find a connection, I made uncomfortable small talk mixed with his brusque interrogation about the Pardee RAND Graduate School. As the minutes crept by, he made a reference to work he was doing with an agricultural workers group. The tomato pickers in Immokalee? I asked (mispronouncing the name as Immikley). Intrigued, David responded, Yes, yes, in Immokalee [rhymes with broccoli, it turned out]. I’ve been working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for years. My old friend Gourmet saved the day and set me on the journey that yielded this book.

Where does our food come from? Like many others, I’ve become more thoughtful over time about the food I eat. At some point I moved beyond aspirations to dine in high-end restaurants or track down unusual ingredients. I try to keep it local and seasonal and have learned to get to know the farmers at the markets. And professionally, I knew that large-scale industrial agriculture can feed the world with cheap food but has hidden costs that any good economist will tell you must be taken into account: costs to the environment and in community health. This is the agricultural system version of the total cost accounting I had worked on when looking at major weapon systems in the Pentagon. But as I learned to take into account the costs to the soil, costs to the air, pesticides, antibiotics, obesity, food security, and the treatment of animals, the piece that was missing was the farmworkers. The people who put the food on our tables. For foodies and those who just care about what they serve their families, journalist and author Eric Schlosser was one of the first to raise his voice and point out this blind spot. Schlosser stood up and said, I’d rather eat a tomato picked by fairly treated labor than an organic tomato picked by a slave.

In the months that followed my trip to Florida, I began to read more about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and their Campaign for Fair Food. What was this farmworker organization fighting for and how did it ever cross their mind to take on fast-food chains like Taco Bell, Burger King, and McDonald’s? Why did the CIW think these corporate giants were key to increasing farmworker pay or eliminating the violence and abuse in the fields that Barry Estabrook, Eric Schlosser, Kevin Bales, and Ron Soodalter wrote about? And where was the government in all of this? As I came to understand, the problem of agricultural labor, particularly fair and humane pay and working conditions for the farmworkers in the fields, had been with us since our nation’s founding. Slavery, immigrant workers, African American workers in the Jim Crow South; the source and color of the workers changed over time but in many ways conditions in the fields were nearly as brutal in twentieth-century America as they had been at the time of the Civil War. They were just less visible as Americans became increasingly removed from the source of the food on their tables, selecting fruits and vegetables from brightly lit produce displays in grocery stores. Did the CIW really have a solution that would make a difference in workers’ lives? Was it really possible that farmworkers themselves, as a community, could successfully take on agricultural labor problems that have existed throughout the history of United States? As I came to learn, the answer is yes. There is a reason to tell and to read this story. At a time when there is great frustration that we seem to be making no progress in solving most of the persistent and complex problems facing our world, the Fair Food Program works. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has transformed the tomato fields from the worst agricultural labor situation in the United States to the best. There is victory in this. There is also the promise of expanding what the CIW has done far beyond the tomato fields to other agricultural workers and even to industrial and low-wage labor more broadly. To achieve the potential of the Fair Food Program, we need to know how we got here and why this has worked when so many other efforts have not. This is what I Am Not a Tractor! is about.

As David Wang and I connected on these issues and possibilities, he introduced me to Greg Asbed, Lucas Benitez, and Laura Germino, three of the principal cofounders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. I visited Immokalee for the first time, making that drive from Naples to the CIW’s offices on Second Street. I saw the chickens in the yards, workers lined up to get food from a local charity, and the black mold on the walls of the one-room apartments with six mattresses stacked waiting for the workers to return from the fields. I also saw the banner that had first announced the Coalition, ¡Una Sola Fuerza! [loosely translated as Strength in Unity!] The Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

I also read more about agricultural working conditions not only in Florida but across the United States. For most of our nation’s history, we’ve struggled with the role and place of agricultural labor in our democracy, and in particular the treatment of the men and women who grow and harvest the food we eat. Our history is a troubled one that didn’t end with the Thirteenth Amendment and the conclusion of the Civil War. The more than four million slaves that worked the sugar cane, tobacco, rice, corn, and particularly cotton fields of the South became the sharecroppers and agricultural workers who worked the land and never seemed to earn enough to cover their debt to the landowners.

In the West, a different story unfolded, or at least a new variation on the story of American agriculture. Open spaces and fertile land offered the possibilities of large-scale farming. Western farmers, particularly those in California, quickly saw the advantage of an immigrant workforce that would provide temporary and seasonal labor. Mexican immigrants came first, after the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Chinese immigrants soon followed when the demand for Western produce grew in the East with the opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. By 1882, Chinese immigrants provided more than 50 percent of the agricultural workforce in California. This situation changed at the turn of the century, when the US Congress passed exclusionary legislation limiting both Chinese immigration and the ability of existing Chinese immigrants to work in the United States. The loss of Chinese workers did little, however, to slow the development of large-scale commercial agriculture in California. The need for labor was massive, and new sources of immigrant labor from the Philippines and Japan, as well as a resurgence of Mexican workers, picked up the slack. Each new wave of immigrants was willing to accept lower wages and accept worse living conditions than those who came before. This pattern of immigrants providing cheap agricultural labor, US citizens feeling the work was beneath them, and xenophobia pushing out one immigrant group to be replaced by the next was repeated time and again.

By 1930, Mexican seasonal workers and Mexican Americans made up 80 percent of the harvest labor in California, following the harvest and then returning to their homes in the Southwest or in Mexico. The Great Depression saw new restrictions on immigrants and an attempt to attract American workers, but the legendary Okies who traveled to California looking for work couldn’t meet the labor demand and the wages promised were often not realized. With the Second World War, domestic farm labor was again in short supply and Mexican immigration increased once again, encouraged by the Bracero Program, which facilitated a steady supply of Mexican farmworkers until the Kennedy Administration ended it in 1964. The ending of the program did little to change the makeup of the western workforce, particularly in California. To this day, the great majority of California produce is harvested by Mexican immigrants.

If western farming, particularly in California, drew on a vast pool of poorly paid immigrant labor, the southern and southeastern states continued to leverage the legacy of slavery, adding a particularly grim twist as Reconstruction came to an end. Formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants provided most of the labor on larger farms and plantations. Southern farmers preferred to hire black agricultural laborers who were willing to work for lower wages, and southern whites considered farm labor beneath them and were unwilling to work alongside freed slaves. Unlike the migrant workers in California, farmworkers in the South were less mobile, tied to the land through sharecropping and debt peonage. It was not uncommon for African Americans to be tricked or coerced into signing contracts as field workers or sharecroppers. Farm owners held the workers’ pay and took out money for expenses from the company store, for seed and supplies, and other debts. Workers were often not paid for the work they were doing. When their contracts concluded at the end of the year, sharecroppers and farm workers still owed money. The penalty for nonpayment was jail, so they kept working in the hope of paying off what they were told they owed.

Farmers and other employers worked with county sheriffs and state prison officials to develop the southern innovation of convict labor and debt bondage. Local authorities were allowed to bind out to local farmers anyone convicted of a crime, felonies and misdemeanors alike, and unable to pay off their fines. Courts would even skip the intermediate step of a fine and impose penalties of fixed terms of labor, particularly during the harvest season. Convict leasing began in Mississippi just after the Civil War ended and quickly spread across the southern states, establishing strong roots in Florida and Alabama. Historian David Oshinsky points out that as Florida’s agricultural industry took off in the late 1800s and early 1900s, first with turpentine and then citrus, and Florida’s interior developed the infrastructure needed to support the new industries, the southern practice of convict leasing turned a serious problem (the punishment of troublesome ex-slaves) into a remarkable gain. The economic benefits went to the growers and other employers, to brokers between the prisons and the producers, and to the state and local governments that benefited from this new source of revenue. Convict leasing provided a functional replacement for slavery that was, if anything, even more brutal without the brake of ownership investment. Oshinsky quotes one southern employer of convict labor: Before the war we owned the negroes. If a man had a good nigger, he could afford to take care of him; if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.

Florida and Alabama were the last two states to allow the leasing of state convicts. But when Florida ended the leasing of state prisoners in 1919, the county jails were quick to help with a steady supply of cheap labor, rounding up African American men for petty or nonexistent crimes when it was time for the harvest. When the leasing of even county prisoners was outlawed in 1923, enterprising sheriffs used a version of debt peonage to provide growers with an able-bodied and cheap workforce. Once arrested, men were assessed exorbitant fines that they worked off in the groves or work camps.

Convict leasing and debt peonage from courthouse fines were not the only ways to maintain cheap labor in the southern states. Tenant farming and share-cropping had their own variation of debt peonage and wage theft. Wages were low. Workers were at the mercy of farm and packing house owners in terms of what they were paid and what they might owe. By the early 1960s, little had changed in the southeastern states. Workers were black and poor and it was often a buyer’s market, with more people who wanted to work than the fields and groves required.

The opportunity for change had come during the Great Depression. Concerned for the state of workers in the United States, Congress passed two foundational pieces of labor legislation: the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The first gave workers the right to organize, join unions, and engage in collective bargaining. The second piece of legislation set basic standards for the fair treatment of workers that are still followed to this day: minimum wage, overtime compensation, the maintenance of timekeeping and other records, and significant limits on child labor. The American public, perhaps spurred on by early investigative journalists like Upton Sinclair or later by the documentary photographs of the Depression by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, had focused on the abuses found in poor working conditions and pay for factory and processing plant workers in an increasingly industrialized economy. Congress’s passage of these landmark labor laws was a transformational moment in US labor relations and working conditions.

True enough. But two groups had been deliberately excluded from the new legislation: domestic workers and agricultural workers. They were excluded because of negotiations between the authors of the legislation and southern congressmen needed for passage of the bills. Blacks were the South’s farmworkers and domestic servants. The congressmen were adamant that black farmworkers or field hands and domestic servants be excluded from any guarantee of labor rights, and this exclusion and separation from a broad category of labor laws and regulations has largely continued to this day. The National Labor Relations Act excluded agricultural laborers through its definition of an employee: shall not include any individual employed as an agricultural laborer. The Fair Labor Standards Act extended this exclusion, defining agriculture broadly to include cultivation, harvesting, dairying, raising of livestock or any animals, and forestry, and anything related to those, such as delivery or storage for markets. In 1966, the Fair Labor Standards Act was amended to prohibit children under sixteen from hazardous agricultural work and to require minimum wage for farm work, although the minimum wage was lower for agricultural workers until 1977. The requirements for minimum wage for farm work are not as strict as for factories or other employment and do not require overtime pay. And minimum wage is difficult to track without timekeeping systems and when farmworkers are hired through contract labor agents and work in fields far from the eyes of farm managers. To make it even more difficult to track down violations of farmworkers’ legal rights, there are still but a handful of inspectors from the Wage and Hour Division in the individual states, most speak only English, and, although there have been some improvements, many spend most of their time with the growers rather than in the fields.

Farmworkers lack the common benefits of health insurance, disability insurance, paid time off, or any sort of retirement benefits. Most have no access to social safety net programs such as SNAP/food stamps, workers’ compensation, Social Security, or Medicaid, even though if they are on the payroll they are paying taxes into these systems. And agricultural work is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States, with an exceptionally high death rate and exposure to pesticides and chemical poisoning.

In 1960, Edward R. Murrow introduced Harvest of Shame, his devastating documentary exposé of agricultural labor in the southeastern states. The setting was Immokalee: This is not South Africa, or the Congo. This is a scene from America, home to the best fed people in the world. As he speaks, we see a crowd of African American workers bidding to work in response to the call of crew leaders, and then crammed into the backs of trucks to head into the fields outside of Immokalee. An Immokalee grower comments on the scene, observing, in an echo of Oshinsky’s employer of convict labor in 1883, We used to own our slaves. Now, we just rent them.

Into the 1970s, Immokalee’s and Florida’s farmworkers were largely African American, in direct contrast to farmworkers in the western states who were primarily from Mexico. Not until the late 1970s, as African Americans left agriculture for other industries, did the demographics change and the number of immigrant workers increase. Haitians, later followed by Mexicans, as well as others from Central America, particularly Guatemala, largely replaced the African American workforce. By the 1990s, farmworkers in Florida were mostly young immigrant men.

Lucas Benitez was one of those young men. Seventeen years old, he had family in Immokalee and the pay sounded good. They told me how it was difficult in Immokalee, but they didn’t tell me the whole story. I had been working the fields [in Mexico] since I was six years old . . . [and] I was ready to work hard. It had been dark when Lucas first showed up in the Pantry Shelf parking lot, joining the crowd of mostly men looking for work. Lots of Haitians plus others from Mexico and Guatemala. Parking lot lights cut through the predawn gloom as the men gathered around the crew leaders looking for the strongest and youngest for their harvesting crews.

He was in. Onto the bus and out to Immokalee’s tomato fields. Lucas knew what hard work was. He also understood the dignity in it. My dad worked very long days but every night he sat with us kids, five boys and a girl. We talked and he told stories. My dad said, ‘remember, we are poor but we have something very important. We have our labor. The rich people of the world have storehouses of money. If you don’t go to work, this money doesn’t work. You need to ask a reasonable price for your labor. You do not give it for free.’

Lucas’s dad taught his children well, but his message hadn’t quite made it to Immokalee. When I came to Immokalee, I saw the cheap price for labor, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. But at seventeen there wasn’t much Lucas could do about it. First, he needed a job and he needed money. So into the fields he went, where he was fast and could keep going forever.

It’s November now, and the first planting of tomato plants was growing fast in the heat. Lucas remembers: I was staking tomatoes. You did this by the hour, not a piece rate. I saw that my coworkers were slow and I was going fast. I finished a row and waited ten minutes for the other workers. A big truck arrived. ‘Hey,’ [the crew leader yelled], ‘what are you doing?’

Lucas replied, Waiting for the crew.

Go back! the crew leader shouted. His whole life, Lucas had never liked if a boss yelled at him, particularly when he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He had his dignity.

No. Lucas wasn’t moving.

I said go back, motherfucker!

No, motherfucker.

Looking back, Lucas still can’t quite believe the scene in that tomato field. I think it was the first time any worker said ‘motherfucker’ to him. I was about 120 pounds then. This guy was about 300 pounds and six feet tall. He was called ‘El Picudo’ after the bird that bites at you and that you should be afraid of.

The crew leader climbed from the truck, furious at the upstart kid. What did you say?!

Lucas didn’t budge. What you heard.

Lucas continues: The guy went to hit me and then saw I had a [tomato] stake in my hands. I said, ‘Hit me! If you hit me, you will definitely get one of my hits back.’

Welcome to Immokalee.

1

TO BEAT ONE OF US IS TO BEAT US ALL!

God, it was frustrating, but the two knew they were in the right place. When Greg Asbed and Laura Germino looked out the window of the small storefront office, they faced the cracked asphalt, broken concrete dividers, and courageous weeds that made up the Pantry Shelf parking lot. Throughout the day, the occasional beat-up Ford or rusted Chevy would pull in, seeking the shade of the grocery store wall. But most were walking. Women, arms loaded with bags, walked out the market’s doors and down streets patterned by the shade of trees loaded with Spanish moss and the glaring sun of southwest Florida. Some carried fruit that reminded them of home in Haiti, but most were carrying the soda, chips, and other junk food that was cheapest in the overpriced market.

The two paralegals, who made up two-thirds of Florida Rural Legal Services’ Immokalee operations, had to arrive early if they wanted to witness the reason for this unincorporated town’s existence. Immokalee was effectively a labor reserve for the big citrus, pepper, tomato, and other produce farms that filled the interior of the state. In the dark of predawn, a hundred or more (mostly) men shifted from one group to the next, clumped around the late-model pickups, the harshness of the headlights emphasizing the exhaustion on their faces. Men stood in the beds of the trucks or on the concrete dividers, shouting in Spanish and English, and indicating with a jerk of the head, a wave of a thumb, that the lucky souls could board the worn-out buses waiting there. If you didn’t get on the bus, you weren’t working that day.

Greg Asbed and Laura Germino were here because of this flood of farmworkers. If you were going to work with farmworkers, if you believed it was possible to take on one of the most intractable labor issues in the United States, Immokalee was the place to be. Laura had seen the opportunity first. Over and over again she heard the name: Immokalee. Working intake for